President of the Society of Biblical Literature 2012 Annual
Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature November 17, 2012
Chicago, Illinois Introduction given by Carol L. Meyers Vice
President, Society of Biblical Literature

If you’ve read the announcement of this session in the SBL
program book—and I suspect many of you have, or else you wouldn’t
have decided to come to this lecture room at this time—you’ve read
the biographical summary providing the basic facts about SBL
president John Dominic Crossan. And even if you haven’t read that
summary, you still probably know many of those basic facts. You are
well aware that he is arguably the world’s foremost
historical-Jesus scholar. (In fact, a local taxi driver, in finding
out that the John Dominic Crossan was a passenger in
his cab, exclaimed that he wanted to put a plaque there to show
where the famous Crossan had sat during the cab ride!) You probably
also know that he is a native of Ireland, that he was educated in
both Ireland (where he earned his doctorate of divinity at the
theological seminary of the national University of Ireland in
Kildare) and in the United States, and that he also did
postdoctoral work in Rome at the Pontifical Biblical Institute and
in Jerusalem at the l’École biblique et archéologique française.
You may also know that he was an ordained priest for many years,
that he left the priesthood in 1969, and that he was on the faculty
of DePaul University here in Chicago until he became professor
emeritus in 1995. And if you’re not familiar with all the twists
and turns—transitions, he calls them—in his long, distinguished,
and fascinating career, you can read about them in his touching
memoir, published in 2000: It’s a Long Way from Tipperary:
What a Former Monk Discovered in His Search for the Truth, a
book that, he quips, some might call “chicken soup for the soul”
but would more accurately be characterized as “Irish stew for the
mind.”

Those of you in New Testament studies, and many Hebrew Bible
scholars too I suspect, know Dom to be a prolific writer. He is the
author of a long list of articles, book chapters, and reviews as
well as twenty-seven books, including his 1991 blockbuster
The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish
Peasant, in which he engages textual analysis, social
anthropology, and historical research (including the use of ancient
documents and also archaeological materials) to reconstruct the
life of Jesus. He wrote Historical Jesus, as he
explains in his memoir, with his academic colleagues in mind as his
readers. How wrong he was. We academics were hardly the only
readers. The book became a religion best-seller, for it is not only
scholarly but also comprehensible by and appealing to
nonspecialists—at least those willing to take on the challenge of
reading a book that is more than five hundred pages long and
contains a fair amount of technical analysis. Despite all the
publicity, Dom expected this best-seller status to be fleeting.
Again, how wrong he was. The Historical Jesus, along
with the shorter version, Jesus: A Revolutionary
Biography, which appeared a few years later, had and still
has wide appeal to a range of intellectually curious people in the
general public, many of whom are unhappy with various aspects of
denominational Christianity. Indeed, the appeal of his books has
hardly subsided. And it has led to a number of unexpected,
unplanned, but enthusiastically welcomed developments in Dom’s
career.

As I mentioned, Dom became professor emeritus in 1995. He may
bear the title emeritus, but that title doesn’t really apply.
Derived from Latin, the term emeritus signifies “one
who has finished or completed one’s service,” or, as it is used in
academia, “one who has left active professional service.” These
definitions could hardly be further from the truth for Dom. For
him, leaving the university meant the freedom and the time to
follow his personal and scholarly passions in other ways than as a
member of a university community. What are those ways?

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